For Gold 'Tis Not The Season To Be Jolly"

While December finds Santa scurrying around the world with his toy sack, this month in recent years has found Gold at best a sad sack. Save for a bare monthly gain in 2014, the past seven years for Gold have decidedly sported December downers. Here are the daily trade tracks of Gold’s cumulative percentage change for each December from 2011 though 2017, (the latter being this month-to-date):

Clearly there’s no reason why this December ought be any different than down:

Come this Wednesday (13 December) the Federal Open Market Committee shall vote to shift their bank’s funds rate up to a targeted 1.25%-1.50% range. Conventional wisdom declares that is a Gold negative, (albeit you and I provably know better, given the 2004-to-2006 increase in the Fed funds rate from 1% to 5%, Gold rising during the same stint by better than 50%);

The FOMC has also initiated its “balance sheet normalization program”, the baby-step approach to withdrawing financial system liquidity having begun in October. Conventional wisdom declares that is a Gold negative, (albeit you and I provably know better, given that the U.S. money supply as measured via “M2” has actually increased October-to-date by $126 billion);

The stock market is in full euphoric soar, the S&P 500 year-to-date now up 18.4%. Conventional wisdom declares that is a Gold negative, (albeit you and I provably know better, given that both the S&P and Gold have together recorded net annual gains in 10 of the past 15 years).

And yet through it all, you and I also provably know that Gold is trading at half its currency debasement value while the S&P is at double its earning support. Visions of sugar plums dance in their heads, but in the midnight depths of our downy pillows we dream of means regression instead.

And thus as the Great Waiting Game trudges forth, we find Gold — at one point up 18.3% in 2017 just shy of Base Camp 1377 at 1362 exactly three months ago on 08 September — now year-to-date up only 8.6% in settling the week yesterday (Friday) at 1251, more than 100 points off that high. So in terms of Gold’s weekly bars, where does that put us?